"[update 3] A number of people on Twitter have told me that that among
Hastings’ current projects was a piece on Barrett Brown, who is currently in jail awaiting
trial for his role as a spokesperson for Anonymous. Hastings was a very
strong advocate of Brown, as the tweets Gallagher has helpfully
provided in the comment thread show. According to Gallagher, he had spoken to Hastings on June 3 to arrange a jail visit."

"It’s obvious by looking at the most recent posts on Barrett Brown’s blog that while he is highly interested in Stratfor, it wasn’t the credit card information that motivated him. When those five million emails leaked, a product called TrapWire, which was created by a company called Abraxas, was revealed to the public at large. And it caused a media shitstorm. In 2005, the founder of Abraxas and former head of the CIA’s European division, Richard Helms, described TrapWire as software that is installed inside of surveillance camera systems that is, “more accurate than facial recognition” with the ability to “draw patterns, and do threat assessments of areas that may be under observation from terrorists.” As Russia Today reported, one of the leaked emails, allegedly written by Stratfor’s VP of Intelligence, Fred Burton, stated that TrapWire was at “high-value targets” in “the UK, Canada, Vegas, Los Angeles, NYC.”

Now, the TrapWire software has largely been dismissed as, nothing to “freak out” over and that hopefully is the case. However, far beyond what the surveillance software itself can or can’t do, the revelation that TrapWire exists has caused a chain reaction of discoveries that have seemingly revealed a mob of very powerful cybersecurity firms.

Barrett Brown was doing some very serious investigating into a company called Cubic from San Diego, that was alleged to own TrapWire as a subsidiary of their firm. This is an allegation that they officially denied. However, these tax filings from 2010 that Barrett uncovered clearly state that Cubic had in fact merged with Abraxas Corporation. If you click through and take a look, you can see that Richard Helms’s name is right there on the top of the first page.

Alongside Abraxas and Cubic on those tax filings is another company called Ntrepid. According to Florida State’s records of corporations, Richard Helms is the director of that company. In 2011, Barrett’s work helped lead the Guardian to their report that Ntrepid won a $2.76 million-dollar contract from Centcom (U.S. Central Command), to create “online persona management” software, also known as “sockpuppetry.” To break it down in plain English, online persona management was created to populate social networks with a bunch of fake and believable social media personas to “influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.”

Ntrepid also has a product they call Tartan, that’s detailed in this internal presentation hosted by the Wall Street Journal. In Ntrepid’s own parlance, they describe Tartan as a program that can “Analyze illicit organizations and less structured social networks by identifying: Ranks of influence within human networks… [and can] end the use of [online] aliases.” Clearly they are looking to dismantle the smoke and mirrors that groups like Anonymous maintain, by hanging out in chatrooms where they do not need to identify themselves officially, with many private communications happening at once. This creates a difficult to penetrate den, where people can easily hide online. Evidently, Ntrepid is seeking to pull all of that apart with Tartan.

In another document on Ntrepid letterhead, titled “Tartan Influence Model: Anarchist Groups,” Tartan is positioned as a software tool that can help combat domestic protestors who operate in “an amorphous network of anarchist and protest groups” and suggests that these groups are prone to violence. They name Occupy Wall Street and Occupy D.C. as part of the problem, and have “built Occupy networks through online communication with anarchists.” By identifying the threat of anarchistic, supposedly violent protestors, Tartan sells its services by saying their software “identifies the hidden relationships among organizers of seemingly unrelated movements… To mitigate the ability of anarchists to incite violence… Law enforcement must identify the complex network of relationships among anarchist leaders.” So, beyond taking apart movements that exist solely online, Tartan is looking to come out and crush real world protest movements as well.

A lot of this information and the connections between it all would not be easy to figure out were it not for Barrett Brown. For one, Barrett started ProjectPM, a wiki that is completely dedicated to piecing together all of this information about surveillance companies in the United States. He even got on the phone with a representative at Cubic to tell them that their company was full of liars and that they do in fact own TrapWire. Without Barrett Brown, tons of this research would likely have gone unearthed. Besides a few journalists, not many people have been looking into this information. The one other group that does is called Telecomix, the guys who are famous for supplying dial-up internet lines to areas of the world with oppressive dictatorships, and who I interviewed about the Gaza conflict here. They operate the Bluecabinet Wiki, and they worked very closely with Barrett Brown to uncover more information about the network of cybersecurity firms.

I talked to one of the volunteers at Telecomix, who strongly believes in the work that Barrett did to connect all of these very confusing dots: “I haven't seen reporters really taking a hard look at what Barrett Brown, the investigative journalist, was researching and where it leads to. His discovery that TrapWire = Abraxas and that there is CIA involvement is very important. Do you know in Berlin right now a game was started to destroy surveillance cameras in public places? Barrett apparently was reading through the emails of HBGary and Stratfor, linking the data to the specific surveillance companies and contractors… It is an extremely time consuming task.”"

"Shady Companies With Ties to Israel Wiretap the U.S. for the NSA" by James Bamford. Wired is usually just a house organ of the Pentagon, and I have to wonder if this explicitness reflects the disgust in the Pentagon at this latest War For The Jews against Syria forced on Barry by the Jewish Billionaires (and announced with the President conspicuously in absentia by an obvious agent of the Jewish Billionaires, almost as if there had been some kind of coup d'état). Also note the comically shoddy outside contractors used by the NSA! The details of the Israeli spying (note Pollard II):

". . . the advanced analytical and data mining software the NSA had
developed for both its worldwide and international eavesdropping
operations was secretly passed to Israel by a mid-level employee,
apparently with close connections to the country. The employee, a
technical director in the Operations Directorate, “who was a very strong
supporter of Israel,” said Binney, “gave, unbeknownst to us, he gave
the software that we had, doing these fast rates, to the Israelis.”
Because of his position, it was something Binney should have been alerted to, but wasn’t.
“In addition to being the technical director,” he said, “I was the
chair of the TAP, it’s the Technical Advisory Panel, the foreign
relations council. We’re supposed to know what all these foreign
countries, technically what they’re doing…. They didn’t do this that
way, it was under the table.” After discovering the secret transfer of
the technology, Binney argued that the agency simply pass it to them
officially, and in that way get something in return, such as access to
communications terminals. “So we gave it to them for switches,” he said.
“For access.”
But Binney now suspects that Israeli intelligence in turn passed the
technology on to Israeli companies who operate in countries around the
world, including the U.S. In return, the companies could act as
extensions of Israeli intelligence and pass critical military, economic
and diplomatic information back to them. “And then five years later,
four or five years later, you see a Narus device,” he said. “I think
there’s a connection there, we don’t know for sure.”Narus was formed in
Israel in November 1997 by six Israelis with much of its money coming
from Walden Israel, an Israeli venture capital company. Its founder and
former chairman, Ori Cohen, once told Israel’s Fortune Magazine that his partners have done technology work for Israeli intelligence. And among the five founders was Stanislav Khirman, a husky, bearded Russian who had previously worked for Elta Systems, Inc. A division of Israel Aerospace Industries, Ltd., Elta
specializes in developing advanced eavesdropping systems for Israeli
defense and intelligence organizations. At Narus, Khirman became the
chief technology officer.
A few years ago, Narus boasted that it is “known for its ability to
capture and collect data from the largest networks around the world.”
The company says its equipment is capable of “providing unparalleled
monitoring and intercept capabilities to service providers and
government organizations around the world” and that “Anything that comes
through [an Internet protocol network], we can record. We can
reconstruct all of their e-mails, along with attachments, see what Web
pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their [Voice over Internet
Protocol] calls.”
Like Narus, Verint was founded by in Israel by Israelis, including
Jacob “Kobi” Alexander, a former Israeli intelligence officer. Some 800
employees work for Verint, including 350 who are based in Israel,
primarily working in research and development and operations, according to the Jerusalem Post. Among its products is STAR-GATE, which according to the company’s sales literature,
lets “service providers … access communications on virtually any type
of network, retain communication data for as long as required, and query
and deliver content and data …” and was “[d]esigned to manage vast
numbers of targets, concurrent sessions, call data records, and
communications.”
In a rare and candid admission to Forbes,
Retired Brig. Gen. Hanan Gefen, a former commander of the highly secret
Unit 8200, Israel’s NSA, noted his former organization’s influence on
Comverse, which owns Verint, as well as other Israeli companies that
dominate the U.S. eavesdropping and surveillance market. “Take NICE,
Comverse and Check Point for example, three of the largest high-tech
companies, which were all directly influenced by 8200 technology,” said
Gefen. “Check Point was founded by Unit alumni. Comverse’s main product,
the Logger, is based on the Unit’s technology.”
According to a former chief of Unit 8200, both the veterans of the
group and much of the high-tech intelligence equipment they developed
are now employed in high-tech firms around the world. “Cautious
estimates indicate that in the past few years,” he told a reporter for the Israeli newspaper Ha’artez
in 2000, “Unit 8200 veterans have set up some 30 to 40 high-tech
companies, including 5 to 10 that were floated on Wall Street.” Referred
to only as “Brigadier General B,” he added, “This correlation between
serving in the intelligence Unit 8200 and starting successful high-tech
companies is not coincidental: Many of the technologies in use around
the world and developed in Israel were originally military technologies
and were developed and improved by Unit veterans.”
Equally troubling is the issue of corruption. Kobi Alexander, the founder and former chairman of Verint, is now a fugitive, wanted by the FBI on nearly three dozen charges of fraud, theft, lying, bribery, money laundering and other crimes. And two of his top associates at Comverse, Chief Financial Officer David Kreinberg and former General Counsel William F. Sorin,
were also indicted in the scheme and later pleaded guilty, with both
serving time in prison and paying millions of dollars in fines and
penalties."

Young:
Yeah, in so far as you want to play up that word. I think that he's
quite courageous to do what he's doing. I'm not convinced that he's
operating as an individual but he certainly gives all the appearance of
being a hero. So I think until proved otherwise, you can look at it that
way.

But I think
he's playing a teasing game too, because he's not so dumb as to dump
everything in one place. That's suicide because he knows he gets screwed
if he does that. The recipients would screw him in their own defense. I
think that it's worth seeing what they do next, because usually these
things have steps. They're testing the market right now: Will he get
public support by releasing more? Under what circumstances? Who will we
give it to? Is this guy going to be badly burned?

The
military calls this being a rabbit: he's being set up to draw fire and
see what happens. And if someone takes a potshot at him, you watch who
does. It's risky behavior, but it's a good way to smoke out the
opposition.

Gawker: In a post on Cryptome, you suggested the leak was a "wargame". Do you think that this might be an elaborate government test?

Young:
Well, it will certainly be used for that purpose. They're certainly
watching the response to this. They not only run their own games, they
watch other people's games. Some are fortuitous like this. Some are
deliberate.

Natsios: I like this notion of the spontaneously combusting war games scenario.
It's not top-down driven, it's just erupts and you study it as a
phenomenon and information emerges that wouldn't otherwise in the
carefully scripted modeling scenario."

"[update 3] A number of people on Twitter have told me that that among
Hastings’ current projects was a piece on Barrett Brown, who is currently in jail awaiting
trial for his role as a spokesperson for Anonymous. Hastings was a very
strong advocate of Brown, as the tweets Gallagher has helpfully
provided in the comment thread show. According to Gallagher, he had spoken to Hastings on June 3 to arrange a jail visit."

"It’s obvious by looking at the most recent posts on Barrett Brown’s blog that while he is highly interested in Stratfor, it wasn’t the credit card information that motivated him. When those five million emails leaked, a product called TrapWire, which was created by a company called Abraxas, was revealed to the public at large. And it caused a media shitstorm. In 2005, the founder of Abraxas and former head of the CIA’s European division, Richard Helms, described TrapWire as software that is installed inside of surveillance camera systems that is, “more accurate than facial recognition” with the ability to “draw patterns, and do threat assessments of areas that may be under observation from terrorists.” As Russia Today reported, one of the leaked emails, allegedly written by Stratfor’s VP of Intelligence, Fred Burton, stated that TrapWire was at “high-value targets” in “the UK, Canada, Vegas, Los Angeles, NYC.”

Now, the TrapWire software has largely been dismissed as, nothing to “freak out” over and that hopefully is the case. However, far beyond what the surveillance software itself can or can’t do, the revelation that TrapWire exists has caused a chain reaction of discoveries that have seemingly revealed a mob of very powerful cybersecurity firms.

Barrett Brown was doing some very serious investigating into a company called Cubic from San Diego, that was alleged to own TrapWire as a subsidiary of their firm. This is an allegation that they officially denied. However, these tax filings from 2010 that Barrett uncovered clearly state that Cubic had in fact merged with Abraxas Corporation. If you click through and take a look, you can see that Richard Helms’s name is right there on the top of the first page.

Alongside Abraxas and Cubic on those tax filings is another company called Ntrepid. According to Florida State’s records of corporations, Richard Helms is the director of that company. In 2011, Barrett’s work helped lead the Guardian to their report that Ntrepid won a $2.76 million-dollar contract from Centcom (U.S. Central Command), to create “online persona management” software, also known as “sockpuppetry.” To break it down in plain English, online persona management was created to populate social networks with a bunch of fake and believable social media personas to “influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.”

Ntrepid also has a product they call Tartan, that’s detailed in this internal presentation hosted by the Wall Street Journal. In Ntrepid’s own parlance, they describe Tartan as a program that can “Analyze illicit organizations and less structured social networks by identifying: Ranks of influence within human networks… [and can] end the use of [online] aliases.” Clearly they are looking to dismantle the smoke and mirrors that groups like Anonymous maintain, by hanging out in chatrooms where they do not need to identify themselves officially, with many private communications happening at once. This creates a difficult to penetrate den, where people can easily hide online. Evidently, Ntrepid is seeking to pull all of that apart with Tartan.

In another document on Ntrepid letterhead, titled “Tartan Influence Model: Anarchist Groups,” Tartan is positioned as a software tool that can help combat domestic protestors who operate in “an amorphous network of anarchist and protest groups” and suggests that these groups are prone to violence. They name Occupy Wall Street and Occupy D.C. as part of the problem, and have “built Occupy networks through online communication with anarchists.” By identifying the threat of anarchistic, supposedly violent protestors, Tartan sells its services by saying their software “identifies the hidden relationships among organizers of seemingly unrelated movements… To mitigate the ability of anarchists to incite violence… Law enforcement must identify the complex network of relationships among anarchist leaders.” So, beyond taking apart movements that exist solely online, Tartan is looking to come out and crush real world protest movements as well.

A lot of this information and the connections between it all would not be easy to figure out were it not for Barrett Brown. For one, Barrett started ProjectPM, a wiki that is completely dedicated to piecing together all of this information about surveillance companies in the United States. He even got on the phone with a representative at Cubic to tell them that their company was full of liars and that they do in fact own TrapWire. Without Barrett Brown, tons of this research would likely have gone unearthed. Besides a few journalists, not many people have been looking into this information. The one other group that does is called Telecomix, the guys who are famous for supplying dial-up internet lines to areas of the world with oppressive dictatorships, and who I interviewed about the Gaza conflict here. They operate the Bluecabinet Wiki, and they worked very closely with Barrett Brown to uncover more information about the network of cybersecurity firms.

I talked to one of the volunteers at Telecomix, who strongly believes in the work that Barrett did to connect all of these very confusing dots: “I haven't seen reporters really taking a hard look at what Barrett Brown, the investigative journalist, was researching and where it leads to. His discovery that TrapWire = Abraxas and that there is CIA involvement is very important. Do you know in Berlin right now a game was started to destroy surveillance cameras in public places? Barrett apparently was reading through the emails of HBGary and Stratfor, linking the data to the specific surveillance companies and contractors… It is an extremely time consuming task.”"

"Shady Companies With Ties to Israel Wiretap the U.S. for the NSA" by James Bamford. Wired is usually just a house organ of the Pentagon, and I have to wonder if this explicitness reflects the disgust in the Pentagon at this latest War For The Jews against Syria forced on Barry by the Jewish Billionaires (and announced with the President conspicuously in absentia by an obvious agent of the Jewish Billionaires, almost as if there had been some kind of coup d'état). Also note the comically shoddy outside contractors used by the NSA! The details of the Israeli spying (note Pollard II):

". . . the advanced analytical and data mining software the NSA had
developed for both its worldwide and international eavesdropping
operations was secretly passed to Israel by a mid-level employee,
apparently with close connections to the country. The employee, a
technical director in the Operations Directorate, “who was a very strong
supporter of Israel,” said Binney, “gave, unbeknownst to us, he gave
the software that we had, doing these fast rates, to the Israelis.”
Because of his position, it was something Binney should have been alerted to, but wasn’t.
“In addition to being the technical director,” he said, “I was the
chair of the TAP, it’s the Technical Advisory Panel, the foreign
relations council. We’re supposed to know what all these foreign
countries, technically what they’re doing…. They didn’t do this that
way, it was under the table.” After discovering the secret transfer of
the technology, Binney argued that the agency simply pass it to them
officially, and in that way get something in return, such as access to
communications terminals. “So we gave it to them for switches,” he said.
“For access.”
But Binney now suspects that Israeli intelligence in turn passed the
technology on to Israeli companies who operate in countries around the
world, including the U.S. In return, the companies could act as
extensions of Israeli intelligence and pass critical military, economic
and diplomatic information back to them. “And then five years later,
four or five years later, you see a Narus device,” he said. “I think
there’s a connection there, we don’t know for sure.”Narus was formed in
Israel in November 1997 by six Israelis with much of its money coming
from Walden Israel, an Israeli venture capital company. Its founder and
former chairman, Ori Cohen, once told Israel’s Fortune Magazine that his partners have done technology work for Israeli intelligence. And among the five founders was Stanislav Khirman, a husky, bearded Russian who had previously worked for Elta Systems, Inc. A division of Israel Aerospace Industries, Ltd., Elta
specializes in developing advanced eavesdropping systems for Israeli
defense and intelligence organizations. At Narus, Khirman became the
chief technology officer.
A few years ago, Narus boasted that it is “known for its ability to
capture and collect data from the largest networks around the world.”
The company says its equipment is capable of “providing unparalleled
monitoring and intercept capabilities to service providers and
government organizations around the world” and that “Anything that comes
through [an Internet protocol network], we can record. We can
reconstruct all of their e-mails, along with attachments, see what Web
pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their [Voice over Internet
Protocol] calls.”
Like Narus, Verint was founded by in Israel by Israelis, including
Jacob “Kobi” Alexander, a former Israeli intelligence officer. Some 800
employees work for Verint, including 350 who are based in Israel,
primarily working in research and development and operations, according to the Jerusalem Post. Among its products is STAR-GATE, which according to the company’s sales literature,
lets “service providers … access communications on virtually any type
of network, retain communication data for as long as required, and query
and deliver content and data …” and was “[d]esigned to manage vast
numbers of targets, concurrent sessions, call data records, and
communications.”
In a rare and candid admission to Forbes,
Retired Brig. Gen. Hanan Gefen, a former commander of the highly secret
Unit 8200, Israel’s NSA, noted his former organization’s influence on
Comverse, which owns Verint, as well as other Israeli companies that
dominate the U.S. eavesdropping and surveillance market. “Take NICE,
Comverse and Check Point for example, three of the largest high-tech
companies, which were all directly influenced by 8200 technology,” said
Gefen. “Check Point was founded by Unit alumni. Comverse’s main product,
the Logger, is based on the Unit’s technology.”
According to a former chief of Unit 8200, both the veterans of the
group and much of the high-tech intelligence equipment they developed
are now employed in high-tech firms around the world. “Cautious
estimates indicate that in the past few years,” he told a reporter for the Israeli newspaper Ha’artez
in 2000, “Unit 8200 veterans have set up some 30 to 40 high-tech
companies, including 5 to 10 that were floated on Wall Street.” Referred
to only as “Brigadier General B,” he added, “This correlation between
serving in the intelligence Unit 8200 and starting successful high-tech
companies is not coincidental: Many of the technologies in use around
the world and developed in Israel were originally military technologies
and were developed and improved by Unit veterans.”
Equally troubling is the issue of corruption. Kobi Alexander, the founder and former chairman of Verint, is now a fugitive, wanted by the FBI on nearly three dozen charges of fraud, theft, lying, bribery, money laundering and other crimes. And two of his top associates at Comverse, Chief Financial Officer David Kreinberg and former General Counsel William F. Sorin,
were also indicted in the scheme and later pleaded guilty, with both
serving time in prison and paying millions of dollars in fines and
penalties."

Young:
Yeah, in so far as you want to play up that word. I think that he's
quite courageous to do what he's doing. I'm not convinced that he's
operating as an individual but he certainly gives all the appearance of
being a hero. So I think until proved otherwise, you can look at it that
way.

But I think
he's playing a teasing game too, because he's not so dumb as to dump
everything in one place. That's suicide because he knows he gets screwed
if he does that. The recipients would screw him in their own defense. I
think that it's worth seeing what they do next, because usually these
things have steps. They're testing the market right now: Will he get
public support by releasing more? Under what circumstances? Who will we
give it to? Is this guy going to be badly burned?

The
military calls this being a rabbit: he's being set up to draw fire and
see what happens. And if someone takes a potshot at him, you watch who
does. It's risky behavior, but it's a good way to smoke out the
opposition.

Gawker: In a post on Cryptome, you suggested the leak was a "wargame". Do you think that this might be an elaborate government test?

Young:
Well, it will certainly be used for that purpose. They're certainly
watching the response to this. They not only run their own games, they
watch other people's games. Some are fortuitous like this. Some are
deliberate.

Natsios: I like this notion of the spontaneously combusting war games scenario.
It's not top-down driven, it's just erupts and you study it as a
phenomenon and information emerges that wouldn't otherwise in the
carefully scripted modeling scenario."